Private and Domestic Devotion is the second volume deriving from the work of a research network funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. The first volume analyzed worship in parish churches. This volume “focuses on the vexed question of private devotion” (4). The interdisciplinary group of authors demonstrates both the scholarly challenges in studying private devotion, for which sources are scarce and oblique, and the contemporary tension between belief in the necessity of prayer and skepticism about the preparedness of laypeople for the exercise. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie note that, with a few exceptions, public worship has been more studied than private devotion.

In the first essay, Ian Green offers an overview of clerical and lay prayer and devotion at home. To uncover what was said in prayers, he focused on biographies and household accounts, and considered the varieties of context and function, from confession and repentance to the resolution of family problems to preparation for death. Jane Dawson offers a “Scottish view on domestic devotion” that highlights an important theme underlying the volume's essays: the transition from late medieval Catholic devotion to the reformed religious life. She describes how elite garden design and domestic architecture provided outdoor spaces and bedrooms for private prayer. Not only do the essays as a whole remark on the transition from late medieval to reformed, they demonstrate the articulation of Catholic and Protestant difference in practice and belief. Erica Longfellow, writing on the Eikon basilike, shows how Charles's solitary suffering posed problems, given the “cultural suspicion” (54) of secrecy and reformed fear of superstition and ostentation in private devotion. Reformed writings on the Passion, an especially challenging subject for reformed authors, emphasized the figurative over the visual, writes Jessica Martin. Micheline White revisits the translation by Anne Lock, Sermons of John Calvin, upon the songe that Ezechias Made, to reveal that the work is more than anti-Catholic; “it engages with Catholic private devotion, in either theoretical or in practical terms” (95). The Penitential Psalms are significant in both Catholic and Protestant devotion, but Hannibal Hamlin shows that the confessional differences about penance and penitence shape their usage in private devotion and prayer. Alison Shell focuses on the work of the mid-seventeenth-century Catholic intellectual John Austin to argue that prayer was an “interdenominational battlefield” (259), with the example of a Catholic text used for secret worship later adopted by a Protestant readership.

The editors note the need for “different methodologies” to uncover “this rich and problematic area” (7) of private devotion, one seen as culminating in public worship. The remaining essays suggest the possibilities inherent in new approaches and sources to reveal domestic devotional practice and expand our knowledge of the social and cultural history of the period. Alec Ryrie analyzes sleep and dreaming in relation to prayer. His study illustrates perspectives on sleep, namely, that it could be seen as a moral failing. He goes a step further to consider the “two sleeps” (84) enjoyed by early modern individuals and how wakefulness could be spent in prayer. Tara Hamling tackles another important dimension of the transition from medieval or Catholic to reformed devotion: visual and material “props.” As Hamling states, not all “material paraphernalia” (139) of Catholicism was eliminated, and she persuasively argues for a reformed use of images through the examples of decoration and painting, an ornate candlestick, and trenchers. Two other essays, by Kate Narveson and Jeremy Schildt, discuss Bible reading, how it was done, and what concerns existed about it. Narveson emphasizes that lay Bible reading was an imperative yet also a source of clerical anxiety about unlearned readers and those who encroached on the clerical office. Bible commonplace books, private gatherings or conventicles, and “lay publication of Scriptural meditations” show the extent of lay reading and the tension between private and congregational devotion. Schildt seeks to answer how Protestants read, focusing on the manuscripts of a married couple and guides for home reading as his sources on note taking and meditations. “Bible-reading . . . was present-centred and absolutely core to readers' lives” (209). Beth Quitslund makes a case for the significance of prayers and psalm singing at home, in the “little church” (250) that was the family. As important as Bible reading was, the metrical psalter outsold the Bible. At the same time, the pleasure to be found in singing and its entertainment value raised qualms.

The essays seek to uncover the “shifting” (7) ground of private devotion, and to do so through a variety of approaches utilizing a wide variety of sources, textual and otherwise. They help to fill a gap in our understanding of early modern religious experience and point toward areas of further research.